I said soul-consuming, I meant soul-crushing (there were a lot of distractions around at the time and I was having trouble remembering the idiom). Point being,

I said soul-consuming, I meant soul-crushing (there were a lot of distractions around at the time and I was having trouble remembering the idiom). Point being, crappy work is hard to staff, and some work is just always going to be crappy. Nobody wants to maintain a hideous collection of accumulated bad decisions workarounds that exist for historical reasons but which have no value other than allowing lazy customers to avoid upgrading their 1970s client code. At IBM we maintained it anyway and hated it. At Google that sort of thing can't keep a team together.